React Router

Follow along with code examples here!

Table of Contents:

Terms

React Router - Enables navigation and routing in single-page applications (SPAs). It allows you to define routes and their corresponding components.
React Router DOM — Provides components like BrowserRouter, Route, and Link to manage routing and navigation.
<BrowserRouter> — It ensures that when users visit different URLs in your app, the right components are rendered based on those URLs.
<Route> — Like a signpost that tells your app which page to show when you visit a certain web address.
<Link> - Special navigation buttons that you can use to move between different pages or views in your web application.
Fallback Component — A component used to render content when no other routes match the current path.
Path Parameters - a dynamic component of a Route path, identified using :pathParam. For example, in the path /products/:productName, the path parameter is :productName and will match any URL with that pattern including /products/iPhone, /products/foo or even /products/5 but NOT /products/iPhone/details
useParams - a React hook that returns an object with key:value pairs for each path parameter in the URL.

React Router Basics

React Router is a package for handling client-side routing in a React application and lets us simulate navigation between different "pages" in our application.

What do we mean by "simulate navigation"?

Normally, when we click on a link like...

<a href="./home.html">Home</a>

...we are redirected to a separate HTML page that our browser needs to fetch from the server.

With React Router, we can do the same kind of navigation, but we actually never leave the page. Instead of opening a separate HTML file, the same HTML file is used, but we just render different components to the screen.

😮 oooooh so smooth...

Using React Router

0) Install the package `react-router-dom`

React Router is not provided by default in Vite projects so we have to install it.

npm i react-router-dom

There is also a react-router-native version for building mobile React apps with React Router

1) Render a `<BrowserRouter>`

We're going to be importing a lot of things from the react-router-dom package. The first is the BrowserRouter component.

import ReactDOM from 'react-dom/client'
import App from './App.jsx'

// import BrowserRouter
import { BrowserRouter } from 'react-router-dom'; 

ReactDOM.createRoot(document.getElementById('root')).render(
  <BrowserRouter> {/* wrap the entire App */}
    <App />
  </BrowserRouter>
)

The BrowserRouter component hijacks the URL bar, letting us:

render what we want to render based on the current URL (the "browser location")
use back-and-forward navigation
directly update the current browser location

2) Create your `<Routes>` and `<Route>`s

Whenever the location changes, <Routes> looks through all its child <Route>s to find the best matching path and renders the provided element.

import { Routes, Route } from "react-router-dom";

const Dashboard = () => <h1>Dashboard</h1>;
const About = () => <h1>About</h1>;
const Products = () => <h1>Products</h1>;

function App() {
  return (
    <>
      <Routes>
        <Route path="/" element={<Dashboard />}></Route>
        <Route path="/about" element={<About />}></Route>
        <Route path="/products" element={<Products />}></Route>
      </Routes>
    </>
  );
}

3) Create `<Link>`s

The <Link> component will replace the <a> tags in our HTML.

Like the <a> tag, the <Link> will provide a clickable button to redirect to another page.
Unlike the <a> tag, the <Link> will NOT actually navigate to a different file, causing a fetch. Instead, only the URL is changed, causing the <Routes> to render a new <Route>, but we stay on the same "page".

function App() {
  return (
    <>
      <nav>
        <ul>
          <li><Link to="/">Home</Link></li>
          <li><Link to="/about">About</Link></li>
          <li><Link to="/products">Products</Link></li>
        </ul>
      </nav>
      <Routes>
        <Route path="/" element={<Dashboard />} />
        <Route path="/about" element={<About />} />
        <Route path="/products" element={<Products />} />
      </Routes>
    </>
  )
}

Fallback Component

Suppose I had this component that I wanted to render when a URL was entered that didn't match any of the routes I defined:

const NotFound = () => <h1>Not Found</h1>;

This can easily be accomplished using the "*" catch-all route. If none of the previous <Route> had a matching path, then this "*" will match.

<Routes>
  <Route path="/" element={<Dashboard />} />
  <Route path="/about" element={<About />} />
  <Route path="/products" element={<Products />} />
  <Route path="*" element={<NotFound />} />
</Routes>

Creating a Product Page

I want to render a page to display a single product...

Suppose I had an array of products that I wanted to show to the user.

const products = [
  { id: 1, name: 'apple', price: 1 },
  { id: 2, name: 'banana', price: 0.5 },
  { id: 3, name: 'cherries', price: 3 },
]

One solution would be to create a separate Route and page component for each of these products:

<Route path="/products/apple" element={<Apple />} />
<Route path="/products/banana" element={<Banana />} />
<Route path="/products/cherries" element={<Cherries />} />

Q: What is the issue with this approach?

Path Parameters

In React Router, the strategy for achieving this is using path parameters.

A path parameter is a dynamic portion of a route path, indicated by a colon :.

<Route path="/products/:productName" element={<Product />} />

In the example above, we use the path parameter :productName. The :productName value can be replaced by anything and as a result, the Product page component will render.

For example, what is the value of the :productName path parameter for the following URLs?

/products/5
/products/hello
/products/banana

`useParams`

Okay so the Product page component will render for /products/apple and /products/banana and /products/cherries, but how does it know which product to show?

The useParams() hook from react-router-dom returns an object with key:value pairs that correspond to the path parameters in the current URL.

const Product = () => {
  const params = useParams();

  // if the URL is /products/apple then
  // params = { productName: 'apple' }
}

Below, you can see how we use productName param value to find the product from the array of products.

import { useParams } from "react-router-dom";

// ideally, this data would come from props or context so it could be shared by the `Products` and the `Product` page components.
const products = [
  { id: 1, name: 'apple', price: 1 },
  { id: 2, name: 'banana', price: 0.5 },
  { id: 3, name: 'cherries', price: 3 },
]

const Product = () => {
  // immediately destructure the params object
  const { productName } = useParams();

  const product = product.find((product) => product.name === productName);

  return (
    <>
      <h1>Product Page</h1>
      <p>{product.name} — ${product.price}</p>
    </>
  )
};

Rendering a dynamic list of links

Finally, the Products page component should show a list of links that let me select which product I want to view.

This is often done by generating a Link for each value in the dataset:

// ideally, this data would come from props or context so it could be shared by the `Products` and the `Product` page components.
const products = [
  { id: 1, name: 'apple', price: 1 },
  { id: 2, name: 'banana', price: 0.5 },
  { id: 3, name: 'cherries', price: 3 },
]

const Products = () => {
  return (
    <>
      <h1>Products</h1>
      <ul>
        {
          products.map((product) => {
            return (
              <li>
                <Link to={`/products/${product.name}`}>{product.name}</Link>
              </li>
            )
          })
        }
      </ul>
    </>
  )
}

Route Specificity

Q: Which of the following paths will match the /products/:id path?

/products
/products/apple
/products/5
/products/5/about

Suppose I wanted to create a page where a user could create a new product. Let's say the path is /products/create:

<Routes>
  {/* Other routes... */}
  <Route path="/products" element={<Products />} />
  <Route path="/products/:id" element={<Product />} />
  <Route path="/products/create" element={<CreateProduct />} />
</Routes>

Even though the /create portion of the last <Route> would match the :id, React Router is smart enough to know that the /products/create path is hard-coded and therefore more specific than the dynamic path /products/:id so it properly redirects us.

Nesting Routes

Currently, I'm defining all of the /products routes by providing the full path.

<Routes>
  <Route path="/" element={<Dashboard />} />
  <Route path="/about" element={<About />} />
  <Route path="/products" element={<Products />} />
  <Route path="/products/:id" element={<Product />} />
  <Route path="/products/create" element={<CreateProduct />} />
  <Route path="*" element={<NotFound />} />
</Routes>

We can nest <Route>s to create sections of our application that share the same base path.

<Routes>
  <Route path="/" element={<Dashboard />} />
  <Route path="/about" element={<About />} />
  <Route path="/products">
    <Route index element={<Products />} />
    <Route path=":id" element={<Product />} />
    <Route path="create" element={<CreateProduct />} />
  </Route>
  <Route path="*" element={<NotFound />} />
</Routes>

We wrap our three <Route>s in an outer <Route> whose path is the base path that the child <Route>s use.
For the first <Route> which renders the <Products /> component, we remove the path entirely and instead use index which will match with the base path (/products) provided in the parent <Route>
For each child, we can remove the /products/ part of the path

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